Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War

WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZEA New York Times Book Review and Atlantic Monthly Editors' ChoiceThomas Jefferson denied that whites and freed blacks could live together in harmony. His cousin, Richard Randolph, not only disagreed, but made it possible for ninety African Americans to prove Jefferson wrong. Israel on the Appomattox tells the story of these liberated blacks and the community they formed, called Israel Hill, in Prince Edward County, Virginia. There, ex-slaves established farms, navigated the Appomattox River, and became entrepreneurs. Free blacks and whites did business with one another, sued each other, worked side by side for equal wages, joined forces to found a Baptist congregation, moved west together, and occasionally settled down as man and wife. Slavery cast its grim shadow, even over the lives of the free, yet on Israel Hill we discover a moving story of hardship and hope that defies our expectations of the Old South.

Princeton history professor Melvin Patrick Ely chronicles a moving story of hope and hardship, pride and achievement, among free blacks in antebellum Virginia. 43 illustrations in text. 3 maps.

Melvin Patrick Ely, a native of Richmond, Virginia, took undergraduate and graduate degrees in history at Princeton University, studied linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia. He has taught in public high schools in Virginia and Massachusetts, at Yale University, and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 1995 he has taught at the College of William and Mary, where he is currently Newton Family Professor of History and Black Studies. He is the author of The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon, and co-translator, with Naama Zahavi-Ely, of The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwins Puzzle, by Amotz and Avishag Zahavi.

An Opening Word: Black Slavery, Black Freedom

Chapter One: The View from Israel Hill, 1863

Chapter Two: Liberty and Happiness

Citizen Richard Randolph and His Slaves

Subordination Was Entirely Out of the Question

Chapter Three: The Promised Land

As Comfortable as the Best in Israel Hill

Neighbors

To Inclose His Little Plantation: The Free Black Drive for Independence

Chapter Four: Work

Sweating Like a Harvest Field Hand

Craft, Mystery, and Occupation

To Run the Road with a Waggon or the River with a Boat

Chapter Five: Challenges

Nat Turner

Edmund Young and Free Black Resistance

Idleness, Poverty, and Dissipation: The Birth of a Proslavery Myth

Chapter Six: Law and Order

Boisterous Passions and Paneless Windows

To Maim, Disfigure, Disable, and Kill

Chapter Seven: Worldviews

Kindred Cultures

Callousness and Closeness

Clashing Values

The Wisdom of Solomon

Chapter Eight: Progress and Struggle

For Richer, for Poorer

Black Freedom and the Crisis of the Union

Chapter Nine: Appomattox and the New Birth of Freedom

Postscript: The Search for Meaning in the Southern

Free Black Experience

Documents

Will of Richard Randolph

Will of Betty Dwin

Will of Thomas Ford

Colonel James Madison on Emancipated Slaves

Will of Philip Bowman

Will of Anthony (Tony) White

Sources and Interpretations

Abbreviations in Notes and Remarks on Primary Sources

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index